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This chapter analyses three-word sequences in Early Modern and Present-day English legal writing by defining their grammatical and functional distribution in Acts of Parliament. The method follows a corpus-driven approach: the lexical bundles are retrieved automatically from the corpus using frequency as the criterion. The study indicates that lexical bundles in acts extend to the textual level and reveals consistent word combinations on the level of the lexis. The study illustrates that the acts are established as a genre, and the overall distribution of both grammatical types and functions of bundles is rather similar in all the analysed periods. Nevertheless, textual organisation is more important in contemporary acts and textual links further become more specific, although early modern bundles already show textual patterning. Noun phrase and prepositional phrases also increase in contemporary acts, indicating a change to nominal writing conventions.

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This paper concentrates on Early Modern English statutes printed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study considers the development of complexity and the rise of modern writing conventions by following the diachronic pragmatic view. The analysis also draws on genre studies and underlines the sociohistorical impact on linguistic changes. Complexity is assessed by a systematic method that observes the textual structure and syntax. The material consists of legislative documents in Early English Books Online; six of the documents were transcribed and compiled into a small-scale corpus.The results indicate that complexity was a common feature in the Early Modern English period: coordination and subordination are frequently used, and the sixteenth-century documents have an increasing tendency to favour subordination. During the sixteenth century, legislative sentences and text type structure become more regular and correspond to present-day practices.

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